Next for Detroit? Find uses for 900 vacant manufacturing sites

The development director for Arte Express Detroit gives an update on what's happening and soon to happen at the Packard Plant.
JC Reindl Detroit Free Press

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The Packard Plant's south water tower stands above the crumbling complex in November 2010, only a few months before it, too, was brought down by scrappers.(Photo: Brian Kaufman, Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo

Detroit, once the industrial powerhouse of the world, now bears the burden of hundreds of vacant industrial sites.

What to do about those sites is the focus of the latest special report from the Detroit Future City Implementation Office, to be released this week.

The numbers alone can stagger: Detroit contains nearly 900 vacant and mostly abandoned manufacturing sites. They include behemoths such as the old Packard Plant, now in line for a multi-year, multi-million-dollar remake. But more than two-thirds of the vacant factory sites measure less than 10,000 square feet — small tool-and-die shops mostly scattered through the city's neighborhoods.

"Many of these buildings abut residential neighborhoods in some of the city’s most disadvantaged areas," the report says. "Without a strategic approach to repurposing these properties, they will remain fallow for years to come, posing threats to public health and safety, and undermining Detroit’s recovery."

The report says the goal is to "put these properties back into productive use; economic, creative, and ecological reinvention for the benefit of Detroit residents and communities, and the preservation of some of the city’s history."

Anika Goss-Foster, the executive director of the Detroit Future City Implementation Office.(Photo: Detroit Future City Implementati)

The modest size of most sites could prove an advantage, said Anika Goss-Foster, executive director of the Detroit Future City office, a nonprofit planning effort.

"There’s even more of an opportunity for us to actually do something with the property, for reuse to happen," she said. "It’s much more manageable, feasible within a reasonable time frame."

But for that to happen, a lot needs to happen. The report recommends restoration of Michigan's brownfield and historic preservation tax credits, more training for developers to tackle such sites, and changes in Detroit's zoning codes to make adaptive reuse of such sites easier to pull off.

And, perhaps most important, we need to see greater acceptance of reusing old industrial sites in new ways, from food production to artist colonies.

"We just haven’t been able to imagine the reuse of some of our sites as entertainment centers or live/art spaces or things like that," Goss-Foster said.

Challenges abound. "Almost a third of vacant industrial sites are ... in small pockets throughout the city that are often near low-income residential neighborhoods," according to the report. "These pockets of industrial blight undermine adjacent property values, isolate the surrounding communities both geographically and economically, and exacerbate poverty."

"Not surprisingly, former industrial sites have left behind a legacy of environmental contamination, adding substantially to the cost and complexity of redevelopment," the report says. "Some buildings have been vacant and unsecured for years, falling victim to deterioration, vandalism and scrapping. In many cases, the buildings themselves have been demolished, leaving large swaths of contaminated land.

"Adaptive reuse of these sites can eliminate threats to public health and safety, while creating new assets and amenities to benefit Detroiters."

Untangling who owns the vacant sites remains a problem, too.

"One of the greatest challenges to the repurposing of buildings and land across the city is ownership," the report says. "Dozens of Detroit’s industrial sites have been vacant for years and have changed hands because of bankruptcy, tax foreclosure and speculation. Currently only approximately 28% of vacant industrial buildings are publicly owned."

For all the problems, though, the report shows an essential optimism. It cites several examples, in Detroit as well as overseas, where even the toughest vacant buildings have been rescued for new uses.

In Detroit, the old Globe Trading Co. building on Atwater Street on the east riverfront stood vacant for decades before being redeveloped into the state's Outdoor Adventure Center, an educational and recreational center operated by the State of Michigan.

And in Turin, Italy, the Lingotto Building, a nearly 100-year-old former Fiat auto plant — once the largest auto manufacturing facility in the world — was renovated into a modern multi-use complex that includes a shopping arcade, concert hall, theater, art gallery and more.

This marks the second intriguing report produced by the office in a couple of months. In March, the office focused on the long-term switch from Detroit's home ownership market to a majority rental market. That report sparked an ongoing debate about how to better serve renters, and how to keep owners from falling into foreclosure.

And this new report could focus new energy on reusing the city's inventory of vacant industrial sites. Massive projects such as the Packard Plant make headlines even as hundreds of defunct tool-and-die shops in the city rust in relative obscurity.

The Detroit Future City effort has followed a winding pathway. Begun under Mayor Dave Bing's administration as the Detroit Works program, the effort eventually resulted in the 300-plus page Detroit Future City report in 2013. The report, dubbed a strategic framework for the city's revitalization, pitched ideas for enlivening the city not in the near term but over the next 50 years.

Once released, it was unclear what, if anything, would be done with it. A small office was set up to further the goals and recommendations. But the office struggled to find a mission even as its staffers worked behind the scenes with neighborhood groups and other players in redevelopment efforts.

Goss-Foster, a longtime civic leader formerly with the nonprofit Local Initiatives Support Corp., which helps neighborhood nonprofits, took over the Detroit Future Office about a year ago. Since then, the office's reports have become more sharply focused, the data underpinning them compelling.

That's good news. The Detroit Future City Strategic Framework offered a visionary appraisal of where and how Detroit may remake itself for the 21st Century. After some initial uncertainty, the office created to advance those goals has found its voice.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.